Summertime in New England is... everything. The saying here is "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute." Crisp, white thunderheads sometimes appear, mostly to our north, as they slide across the I-84 highway corridor (weird!) and dump storms in Massachusetts. Of course we get them here too, but the ocean influence (the Long Island Sound to our south) keeps them away many times. That's my theory anyway.

I have tried growing hundreds of vegetables, berries, and fruits during our long, warm summer days! Here I am with one of our success stories: turmeric. And below, a close relative of turmeric: ginger. Both grow their edible part underground and send up lush, tropical looking foliage during the summer.

I have grown popcorn, peanuts, persimmons, grapes, plums, fiddleheads, hazelnuts, and more. Growing a diverse set of organic foods from seed (sometimes my own saved seed) takes a lot of time and it's a true luxury in the modern era. Plus, many crops don't store for long, and so growing and harvesting them also means "putting them up", a skill which I honed over the years to take as little time as possible, but it's still many hours of work. 

Now we focus on growing great elderberries, which are a perennial crop that also draws birds and pollinators. Here I am with one of the hundreds of buckets we collect in a good year.

We have a rainwater capture system on the farm which we use to irrigate our crops. This system prevents us from drawing too much on our underground aquifer and drying out our well during a dry summer. Pictured above: buckwheat with overhead sprinkler irrigation. 

Since 2010, we've used solar panels to generate electricity and return the excess to the grid. Something that plants have been doing for thousands of years -- using sunlight to generate energy with which to grow -- I guess we humans are starting to catch up ;-) Here in fairly heavily forested Lyme, CT, trees fall on the electric lines several times each year, and we thought solar panels would be a good backup for those storms. One of the interesting things we learned is that the solar panels won't generate electricity for us if the grid is down. Still, the panels were a good investment.

As summer moves into Fall, the sunflowers and zinnias look great! Read more about our seasons on the farm here.